The House That Moved by APIARY Magazine

THE HOUSE THAT MOVED

Some of the open spaces on the long rows of houses were

there waiting for something new, some were the scars of things collapsed and gone. The house that moved found its way in and out of those holes in the blocks that wound up the hill. Its windows looked sometimes to the sun breaking under the passing clouds or to the city skyline or at the frustrated suits shoveling off their cars. It didn’t linger long in any one spot before moving somewhere else leaving its odd prints in the snow and dirt. Behind it dropped a trail of all the familiar things once found inside, littering the streets with furniture, photographs, boxes of Christmas decorations. Until all that was left were the two of them sitting at a kitchen table with nothing to look at but nothing. He counted tiles on the floor. She watched the edge of her fingernails run across the lip of the table. The light from outside sprayed in at odd angles as the house moved, sometimes up the hill deeper into the tight regiments of houses, sometimes down to the green dingy river. He stood and walked to the sink, letting the water that dripped from the faucet run over his fingers before slamming his hand down on it. He found a voice strangely quieter than his fist. “This thing never worked.” “The noise used to keep me up when we first moved here. I guess I got used to it.” She moves her head in his direction, pointing her voice towards him but not her eyes. The house rumbled beneath them and began to move again. They

were oblivious, hating and thankful for the silence that broke apart their conversation. “I could stay until later.” She shook her head viciously, gave him a quick stare and a smile painfully polite. “That doesn’t make any sense.” A snow squall blew behind him in the window. They had moved again. The old slate roof of the abandoned school building on their block could be seen in the distance. The closer rooflines she didn’t recognize. “Does it?” “No. Not really. I left the address, in case-” “I saw. Good. In case.” “I’ll come by tomorrow. There are some things I couldn’t fit. Say one?” “One’s fine. I’ll be at work.” On the wall in the far corner of the kitchen, just next to the refrigerator was a large crack where the plaster had peeled. Water continually seeped in. She noticed it when they first saw the place, a long finger of discolored paint, stained from the outside weather, creeping down the wall. First he tried to seal it but the water came through anyway, turning the putty a filthy yellow and cracking it further. Then she tried three successive colors, each one darker than the last, to conceal it. Three attempts failed. So she painted the wall a bright red. He came home and saw her, wearing splatter like warpaint, slashing at the wall with a roller, going over it again and again, putting seven coats of paint on the wall. Then she watched it all night long. She sat on the kitchen table with her knees crossed staring, daring the crack to come back. The next morning he came to the kitchen for breakfast, saw her crying and saw the crack in the wall. He couldn’t help but

laugh. She stared at him angrily while his back was turned and in one final fit of rage she swiped the still bleeding roller down the back of his T-shirt while he was getting a drink of water. He turned to her, shocked, as her face went from fury to disbelief before melting into apologetic laughter. So he took his shirt off and he used a thumbtack from the drawer no one ever cleaned to hang it over the crack, the smeared red paint facing them both. It was her newest piece of art, he said and was glad it was hanging in their home and not another of those poorly lit galleries she always found. She thought how she loved his sense of humor as she spent the next three weeks looking for a replacement shirt. Each time the house moved to a new spot, the crack widened. The shirt that hung all that time fell unnoticed to the ground. From where she sat she saw the shadows of the houses around them stretch and yawn across his back coloring away all the little things about him she knew. For hours that morning they had walked around a hanging silence with a strange ugly sounding conversation until finally the house began to shift underneath them. They were unsure, by the afternoon, who wanted it to go first but that was academic now. They did notice the shaking walls initially but that soon disappeared into the background. They could hear the last of their things make soft impressions made in the dirt and snow, the house throwing things away while they looked at how they weren’t really looking at each other. They knew their things were going, those little useless items that had parts of her story and parts of his together, knew they should miss them, should try to stop the house from throwing them aside but the things themselves started to look a little too unfamiliar, some too sharp to grab at. Even her hair, which had started that morning thin and light had

turned long and brown while they spoke or didn’t speak. Each tense and laden syllable they dropped gave the house one more thing to throw away. She stood to put her cup of coffee in the sink, felt him looking at her hair. He hadn’t moved from his spot at the counter and they were close. She heard him thinking. “I feel like I’ve seen you here before. In this exact spot. What do they call that?” He said nothing though, of course, he knew. It might be the last thing he said to her and he didn’t want it to be that. He wanted something memorable. Everything had the feel of heat and transition as he walked past her long hair, which still smelled the same, to the doorway opposite. There was a little blue bag he nudged from his path. “Okay.” Then there was a lurch. The house came to a standstill launching everything left inside from its place- a small plant in a ceramic pot he bought her once when she was sick tumbled, a picture fell off the wall and the shattered glass left a slice in the print she knew he wanted. The cup she had perched near the sink tumbled backward. They watched it drop for each ticking minute until it shattered an hour later on the tiles, splitting into jagged teeth that caught the remaining sunlight and glowed white, veined with coffee stains. Neither one of them moved, though, still watching it. It was now almost evening. He pointed to the floor. “Don’t cut your feet.” “I won’t.” “I’ll get the broom.” “No. That’s okay.” She moved closer to him, raising her long hair like a curtain against the kitchen. She thought about touching his coat, she

hadn’t seen him take it from the closet. He put his hand against the wall, his fingers bumping along clumps of paint badly applied by a previous tenant. “Okay.” She looked at him then. There was so much in his face that she knew. “Okay.” He picked up his bag and moved quickly to the front door. She didn’t look at it once it had shut. Outside, the house had settled in a vacant spot on a quiet unfamiliar street. The faces of the houses that surrounded it were all different, the cars that lined the street were unknown. There was a sharp metal whine as a train stopped nearby. He wasn’t sure where he was, if it was even the same city or where his tightly packed car was. He didn’t look around him long before he began to walk, it was late. Everything sounded real, felt real. The air made him cold. Car exhaust, coarse and nauseating, hung around him. He had no direction to go because he had so sense of origin. He walked out of a house he didn’t know onto a sidewalk he didn’t know looking at things he didn’t know. The house that moved was even a different color. Not that he noticed that until he was a block away and turned to look at it only, as he rationalized, to get some better idea of where he was. He made a random left turn and lost sight of the house, walking into a gripping feeling like the cold. He paid no attention to the prints the house had made on its journey or the things that used to belong to him that he passed, now discarded on the snow and street. He felt like he had forgotten something. J.A. Curcione